Monday, March 30, 2009

The Mexican Gun CanardTM

INDENT I found this graphic depiction of the anti-gun side's latest desperate gambit (which is beginning to take on the name "The Mexican CanardTM") in my local paper on Friday. I'm not going to waste a lot of time critiquing the cartoon; it's a good work in that it expresses its creator's opinion almost instantly in a visual way, and the editor has told me in the past that this cartoonist's job is to upset people so they'll pay attention. Judging by the comment section, he's doing that job, so I doubt he cares what I have to say.

INDENT I'm not going to spend a lot of time on the factual implausibility of the Mexican Canard today. Others have debunked this latest gun-control myth ably and with alacrity, and frankly I'm late to the party. What I'd rather do today is to point out a parallel that's been bugging me for a few days.

INDENT Am I the only one who remembers The Terrorist CanardTM? That was the proposition that Al Qaeda terrorists were coming to the United States to buy their weapons, since they could walk into any gun show, shout "Death to America!" for a 10% discount on admission and parking, and buy a truckload of "assault weapons" no questions asked. It was an honorary hypotenuse on the Triangle of DeathTM (anybody remember the Triangle of DeathTM?) The only problem was that it was obviously not true. Those "assault weapons" the Violence Policy Center was nattering about were semi-automatic lookalike versions, while terrorists who lived in places like Pakistan or Somalia had easy access to the real, fully-automatic versions at home. Moreover, the semi-automatic versions available in limited numbers at an American gun show were going for hundreds of dollars apiece, while the full-auto versions in third-world countries were going for more like tens. Essentially, the Terrorist CanardTM stated that terrorists were leaving places where they could buy large numbers of fully-automatic AK-47 rifles for a few dollars apiece, paying for airfare to fly to a country with much stricter and more capable law enforcement in the hopes of buying a few semi-automatic weapons for hundreds of dollars apiece. It made the opposite of sense.

INDENT This newest gambit is basically the same idea wrapped in a tortilla. It only sounds scary until you think it through; if you were a leader in a Mexican cartel with access to rifles, ammunition, grenades and RPG's from Mexican military arsenals, M16 rifles and ammunition from scavengers all over South America who have old American military exports to sell on the cheap, and a dozen other sources . . . would you be sending people to gun shows in Tucson and Albuqurque to find someone with a clean background check to buy a few semi-automatic rifles and then try to smuggle them south? When it fails, it'll end up the same way as The Terrorist CanardTM did--forgotten once it's no longer useful as a club to bea gun owners over the head.INDENT